US security officials warn of the threat coming from American citizens fighting alongside anti-Assad jihadist rebels in Syria – and might return to the US radicalized, experienced and ready to attack.

The latest estimates by the British defense consultant, IHS Jane’s, and cited by AP put the number of US fighters who have traveled to Syria to support the rebels at a couple of dozen. US security officials are far from underestimating the potential risks they represent.

“We know that American citizens as well as Canadian and European nationals have taken up arms in Syria, Yemen and in Somalia. The threat that these individuals could return home to carry out attacks is real and troubling,” said Senator Thomas Carper at a Senate homeland security committee hearing in November.

“Many homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) lack advanced operational training, which forces them to seek assistance online from like-minded extremists or pursue travel to overseas jihadist battlegrounds to receive hands-on experience”, said Olsen. “Recent political unrest in many parts of North Africa and the Levant, including in Syria, affords HVEs opportunities to join militant groups overseas. Foreign terrorist groups could leverage HVEs to recruit others or conduct operations inside the US or overseas.”

The issue was first brought up in August by the then FBI Director Robert Mueller and appears to be still high on the agenda.

The current FBI Director, James Comey, said in November that he was worried about Syria becoming a repeat of Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion, with foreign fighters attracted there to train.

Figures by IHS Jane’s suggest the situation now in Syria is actually much worse than it was 30 years ago in Afghanistan.

“Only the Afghan insurgency against the Soviet Union in 1979-89 compares with Syria in terms of the number of foreign fighters. An in-depth study by Norwegian scholar, Thomas Hegghammer, in the journal International Security in late 2011 estimated that 5,000 to 20,000 foreign fighters had travelled to Afghanistan between 1980 and 1992. As such, the arrival of 5,000 to 10,000 foreign fighters in Syria in only 18 months appears highly significant,” according to IHS Jane’s September report.

This year, at least three Americans have been charged with planning to fight beside Al-Qaeda linked extremist groups.
A Pakistani-born North Carolina resident, Basit Sheikh, 29, was arrested at Raleigh-Durham International Airport in early November on charges he was on his way to Lebanon with the purpose of joining Jabhat al-Nusrah, a terrorist group associated with Al-Qaeda, operating in Syria.

In a similar way and for the same reasons, Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, 18, was detained in April at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport before allegedly boarding a plane bound for Turkey.

In March, a US Army veteran, Eric Harroun, of Phoenix, 31, was charged with conspiring with an Al-Qaeda group to wage war against the Syrian government. However, in September he was released after a secret plea deal.

Sheikh and Tounisi were captured as part of sting operations in which the FBI used websites to dupe potential jihadists into writing messages to agents posing as terrorist recruiters.

The practice has however raised questions over its moral correctness.

“These sites can end up creating crimes,” said Phil Turner, a former federal prosecutor who now works as a defense attorney, following Tounisi’s arrest in April. “Real terrorists don’t need to go to a website for contacts. They have real contacts. From your office computer, you can get millions of cases like this – sucking people in. But it diverts our attention from the real terrorists.”

In the most recent case, Sheikh commented to an undercover FBI employee’s posts on a Facebook page promoting Islamic extremism. The online relationship struck up as a result led to the man’s eventual arrest. He could face up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if found guilty.

The Palestinian daily Al-Quds reported that the Egyptian authorities have taken effective measures to revoke the citizenship of Zahar and many other Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.

The paper quoted an Egyptian source as saying that the latest measure targeted Palestinians who are “affiliated with certain Palestinian political parties or those who are connected to outlawed groups in Egypt.”

The source pointed out that Egyptian law prohibits those who obtain Egyptian citizenship from engaging in political activities or membership in political parties in the first five years.

Palestinian sources claimed last year that the Egyptian authorizes had agreed to grant citizenship to more than 50,000 Palestinians who were born to Egyptian mothers.

Last month, the Egyptian daily Al-Youm Al-Sabe revealed that Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim turned down a request by members of Zahar’s family to receive Egyptian citizenship.

The paper said that the decision was taken for “security reasons.” The decision applied to Zahar’s daughter, Huda, and his nephews, Abdullah and Ahmed.

Zahar confirmed last year that he had been granted Egyptian citizenship. He said that he was also planning to vote in the Egyptian presidential election.

KIEV, Ukraine — A protest by about 300,000 Ukrainians angered by their government’s decision to freeze integration with the West turned violent Sunday, when a group of demonstrators besieged the president’s office and police drove them back with truncheons, tear gas and flash grenades. Dozens of people were injured.

The mass rally in central Kiev defied a government ban on protests on Independence Square, in the biggest show of anger over President Viktor Yanukovych‘s refusal to sign a political and economic agreement with the European Union.

The protesters also were infuriated by the violent dispersal of a small, opposition rally two nights before.

While opposition leaders called for a nationwide strike and prolonged peaceful street protests to demand that the government resign, several thousand people broke away and marched to Yanukovych’s nearby office.

A few hundred of them, wearing masks, threw rocks and other objects at police and attempted to break through the police lines with a front loader. After several hours of clashes, riot police used force to push them back.

Dozens of people with what appeared to be head injuries were taken away by ambulance. Several journalists, including some beaten by police, were injured in the clashes.

Opposition leaders denounced the clashes as a provocation aimed at discrediting the peaceful demonstration and charged that the people who incited the storming of the presidential office were government-hired thugs.

Several opposition leaders, including world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, walked over to Yanukovych’s office to urge protesters to return to Independence Square. Order appeared to have been restored by Sunday night, with rows of riot police standing guard behind metal fences.

Some protesters then headed to Yanukovych’s residence outside Kiev, but their cars were stopped by police.

Speaking before the vast crowds on Independence Square from the roof of a bus, the opposition leaders demanded that Yanukovych and his government resign.

“Our plan is clear: It’s not a demonstration, it’s not a reaction. It’s a revolution,” said Yuriy Lutsenko, a former interior minister who is now an opposition leader.

Chants of “revolution” resounded across a sea of yellow and blue Ukrainian and EU flags on the square, where the government had prohibited rallies starting Sunday. Thousands of protesters remained late into the evening and some were preparing to spend the night on the square.

The demonstration was by far the largest since the protests began more than a week ago and it carried echoes of the 2004 Orange Revolution, when tens of thousands came to the square nightly for weeks and set up a tent camp along the main street leading to the square.

The opposition leaders urged Ukrainians from all over the country to join the protests in the capital.

“Our future is being decided here in Kiev,” Klitschko said.

Ukrainian lawmakers meet Monday for consultations and planned to hold a parliament session Tuesday. The opposition is hoping to muster enough votes to oust Prime Minister Mykola Azarov‘s Cabinet after several lawmakers quit Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in protest.

The U.S. Embassy issued a joint statement from U.S. and EU ambassadors encouraging Ukrainians to resolve their differences peacefully and urging “all stakeholders in the political process to establish immediate dialogue to facilitate a mutually acceptable resolution to the current discord.”

Protests have been held daily in Kiev since Yanukovych backed away from an agreement that would have established free trade and deepened political cooperation between Ukraine and the EU. He justified the decision by saying that Ukraine couldn’t afford to break trade ties with Russia.

The EU agreement was to have been signed Friday and since then the protests have gained strength.

“We are furious,” said 62-year-old retired businessman Mykola Sapronov, who was among the protesters Sunday. “The leaders must resign. We want Europe and freedom.”

As the demonstrators approached Independence Square and swept away metal barriers from around a large Christmas tree set up in the center, all police left the square. About a dozen people then climbed the tree to hang EU and Ukrainian flags from its branches.

Several hundred demonstrators never made it to the square. Along the way they burst into the Kiev city administration building and occupied it, in defiance of police, who tried unsuccessfully to drive them away by using tear gas.

The EU agreement had been eagerly anticipated by Ukrainians who want their country of 45 million people to break out of Moscow’s orbit. Opinion surveys in recent months showed about 45 percent of Ukrainians supporting closer integration with the EU and a third or less favoring closer ties with Russia.

Moscow tried to block the deal with the EU by banning some Ukrainian imports and threatening more trade sanctions. A 2009 dispute between Kiev and Moscow on gas prices resulted in a three-week cutoff of gas to Ukraine.

Yanukovych was traveling to China for a state visit this week. Afterward, the president planned to visit Russia and reach agreement on normalizing trade relations, Azarov said Sunday.

For Yanukovych, memories of the Orange Revolution are still raw.

Those protests forced the annulment of a fraud-tainted presidential election in which he was shown to have won the most votes. A rerun of the election was ordered, and he lost to Western-leaning reformist Viktor Yushchenko.

Yanukovych was elected president five years later, narrowly defeating then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the leading figure of the Orange Revolution.

Tymoshenko was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in 2011 for abuse of office, a case that the West has widely criticized as political revenge. The EU had set Tymoshenko’s release, or at least her freedom to go to Germany for treatment of a severe back problem, as a key criterion for signing the association pact with Ukraine.

The prospect of freeing his archenemy was deeply unattractive to Yanukovych, who comes up for re-election in early 2015.

Federal investigators are in New York to determine why a Manhattan-bound Metro-North passenger train spun out of control early Sunday in the Bronx, killing four people and propelling dozens of passengers out of their seats as Thanksgiving crowds headed home on one of the busiest travel days of the year, authorities said.

At least 63 people were injured, 11 of them listed in critical condition. The crash is thought to be the deadliest train wreck in New York City since 1991, when five people were killed and more than 150 were injured in a subway train derailment in Lower Manhattan, authorities said

Weener, speaking next to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), said several federal teams — including experts on tracks, signaling and breaking — would be investigating for a week to 10 days.

“Our mission is to understand not just what happened but why it happened, with the intent of preventing it from happening again,” Weener said.

In response to media questions about reports that the train conductor said the brakes had failed and that the train was being pushed by a locomotive, making it harder to stop, Weener said: “We don’t know at this point. We will be looking at it.”

Investigators will be looking at the train’s speed and had already recovered the data recorder, he said. Several passengers told the news media that the train appeared to be going too fast around the curve when it skidded off the tracks and sent some passengers flying into the air, tumbling over one another.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority identified the victims as Donna L. Smith, 54, of Newburgh; James G. Lovell, 58, of Cold Spring; James M. Ferrari, 59, of Montrose; and Ahn Kisook, 35, of Queens. Three of them were found outside the train and one was inside, authorities said. Autopsies are scheduled for Monday.

Cuomo said the train operator was being treated for injuries and was talking with officials.

“This is an opportunity for the NTSB to review the operation,” Cuomo said. “As I said before, safety is job one. And if there is a lesson to learn, we want to make sure we learn it. It’s a reminder to all of us that life is a precious gift and take everyday as that.”

Many passengers told reporters they were sleeping or listening to music on Train 8808, which departed at 5:54 a.m. from Poughkeepsie and was due to arrive at Grand Central Terminal at 7:43 a.m.

They said they experienced a harrowing awakening after they heard screeching metal. One car flipped down a riverbank, inches from where the Harlem River meets the Hudson. New York Police Department scuba divers, along with helicopter crews and trained dogs, searched for survivors.

Many passengers were coming home from Thanksgiving weekends. Others were on their way to work, including an injured female New York City police officer in her 20s.

Fire Commissioner Salvatore J. Cassano told reporters that there were about 100 people on the train, adding that the toll would have been worse if the accident had occurred later on the busy travel day or during the workweek. “On a workday, fully occupied, it would have been a tremendous disaster,” he said

At the White House, President Obama said his “thoughts and prayers” went out to the injured and the loved ones of those killed.

This is the train service’s second passenger-train derailment in six months, during a year that has seen a string of safety problems.

The troubles for the commuter train system began May 17, when an eastbound train derailed in Bridgeport, Conn., and was hit by a westbound train in a crash that injured 73 passengers, two engineers and a conductor. Eleven days later, track foreman Robert Luden was struck and killed by a train in West Haven, Conn. It was the first time in more than four years that a Metro-North worker had been fatally struck by a train.

In an “urgent safety recommendation,” the NTSB said that a trainee rail-traffic controller had opened a section of track without the proper clearance.

This month, Metro-North’s chief engineer, Robert Puciloski, told NTSB investigators that the railroad is “behind in several areas,” including a five-year maintenance schedule, which has not been conducted in the area of the Bridgeport derailment since 2005.

“It would appear the train was clearly going too fast on the curve,” said City Council member Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx). “I take this train every morning, and they always slow on this curve. On first look, it appears the operator was going way too fast.”

Television images showed passengers emerging from the train bleeding and scratched.

Michael Keaveney, 22, a security worker who lives in a co-op apartment building overlooking the crash site, said he could not believe what he saw.

“I was dead asleep and heard a loud boom,” said Keaveney, who was reached by phone. “I could see four cars flipped over. It was shocking. My mother called 911 and I got dressed and ran down to see if I could help, but firefighters were already there.”

In July, a CSX freight train hauling trash derailed in the same area because of a track issue, but no one was injured. Keaveney said he witnessed the train flip over in that accident. “It makes me grateful that I have a car,” he said.

Joel Zaritsky of Poughkeepsie awoke early to catch the 5:54 a.m. train so he could attend a dental convention in New York. He was asleep when he was thrown to the other side of the train.

“There was smoke everywhere and debris,” he said, showing a crowd of media his bloody right hand. “I still can’t believe it. I’m very happy to be alive.”